At the beginning of this past school year, I had made an agreement with my oldest daughter that if she could maintain at least a B average, I would be happy to pay for her plane ticket to Tampa where she intended to spend a month of the summer with my fabulously wealthy sister.
Sharing that wealth, at least with me, doesn't seem to be in the cards and I made a promise I had no way of financially keeping without running up another credit card.
Considering my daughters past academic track record though, I wasn't all that worried and considered it a pretty safe bet. Even she had covered her bases by getting a part-time job during the school year at the local market.
When you live in the country "local" is a relative term and the market was a couple of miles from the house, far enough any way to make her part-time job my part-time taxi service and costing me a fortune in gas!
The irony of my life never ends and I recently found myself rooting against my daughter doing well on her final exams. Her 85 on the very last exam, World History of all things, cost me $685 and a month without my little girl.
She's been in Florida for about a week now and I miss her terribly. Her inquisitive nature and passion for the unusual keeps me on my toes and filled with writing material and although the other kiddos keep me as busy as ever, that spot in my heart for my first born aches every time I think about her which is every second of every day!
I spoke on the phone with her just last night and she said my sister would not allow her to attend a concert down at the waterfront this weekend and could I please talk to her about it.
I pretended that I was in her corner and had every intention of making my sister the bad guy in all this. You upset my daughter by not giving in to what she wants and believe me, you will pay dearly for it...did I mention my sister has money but won't give me any?
Anyway, my sister got on the phone and said there was no way my little miss was going to any concert, especially considering whom it was that was playing.
I waited for her to tell me but all I heard was deafening silence. My sister suffers in silence louder than anyone I know and I could feel her disappointment burning into me on how I've gone about raising such an opinionated and irresponsible child.
I've always liked most of my daughter's music and have even accompanied her to a few concerts. Actually, I was the taxi service again and not permitted to acknowledge her existence while at the concert hall, but still, I usually enjoyed myself, happily sharing the experience with other forgotten parents up in the nose-bleed section.
A fair compromise I suppose, but my sister would have none of it. She told me there was a story about this band in the paper just the other day and that they were nothing but a bunch of drugged up hippies playing the Devil's music.
Oh my, the Devil's music?
Yes, the Devil's music!
I asked her the name of the band and she said it was, "Betty's Not A Vitamin".
My first thought was, cool title for my next story followed by, what the heck does that mean?
She said that the lead singer was so stoned (allegedly) one night back in the early nineties, when they were still trying to come up with a name, that he had lined up all the Flintstones chewable vitamins, probably to play some perverted game, and noticed there was no Betty Rubble.
His first words upon this realization were, "Betty's not a vitamin". Somehow his band buddies thought this a great name for the group and even though Betty was added to the vitamin line up in 1995, they kept the name.
She went on and on about their questionable moral character and such, and I could hear my daughter yelling in the back ground that none of this was true. On and on she went until she finally noticed I had not responded.
"Well?" she said with irritation in her voice, "Don't you have anything to say about all this?"
I did in fact have something to say. "You mean to tell me that Betty Rubble was not part of the original Flintstones chewable vitamins... Why?"
"I don't know why", my sister yelled in exasperation, "She is now, and in fact I think she actually replaced the flint mobile, but what the heck does any of this have to do with your daughter wanting to go see these miscreants?"
"Wow", is all I could say, "even Dino was a Vitamin, how could they have left Betty out?"
My daughter got back on the phone, I guess my sister had dropped it when she started banging her head against the wall, and told me that I would love this group and that I should go "on-line" and listen to them.
Just Google "Betty's Not A Vitamin" she said and you can check them out. Which, of course is exactly what I did and I liked their sound so much I plan to buy their album if I'm able to find it.
I also insisted that my sister allow her to go to this concert and that if she did not want to take her, I'd be happy to jump on a plane and go down there and do it myself...if she paid for the ticket, of course.
My sister weighed her options and figured her time was not quite worth the $685 plane ticket, plus room and board, and reluctantly agreed to take her to the concert.
I cried when I got off the phone because I so badly wanted to share this experience with her but I simply could not afford to.
You can't put a price on the time you spend with your children, but in this case it would have been $685.
For more from the mind of Myla, go to
http://www.mylamadson.com
